Akron Public Library

"He was history's most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The author of the acclaimed bestsellers Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills...

Describes the life and work of the courageous man who changed the way people saw the galaxy, by offering objective evidence that the earth was not the fixed center of the universe.

For more than thirty years-half his life-he was obsessively devoted to investigating Everything in the natural world. Nothing escaped his interest-how our eyes see, why the sky is blue, what forces build mountains, how light travels, where water comes from, and-most fascinating of all to Leonardo-the inner workings of the human body. Nothing stopped him. It was illegal to dissect human corpses, so he did autopsies in secret, even devising a clever...

The author and biogrpaher shows us that Galileo was far more than a mathematician: he was deeply knowledgeable in the arts, an expert on the epic poet Ariosto, a fine lutenist. The author notes that years of reading the poets and experimenting with literary forms were not mere sidebars - they enabled Galileo to write clearly and plausibly about the most implausible things. The author argues that Galileo changed the world not simply because he revolutionized...

With reproductions of art masterpieces in full color, this book examines the life and art of Leonardo da Vinci and focuses on the cultural developments of the era in which da Vinci lived.

"Michael White's biography argues that Leonardo was, through the scope of his investigations and his desire to push back the boundaries of knowledge, nothing less than 'The First Scientist'. Exploring the legacy of research he left behind - lost for two hundred years after his death, and probably half of it lost for ever - White finds evidence not just of a true polymath but of a true man of science. His notebooks contain thoughts on such diverse...